Young sign languages, multimodality and rapid language evolution in Papua New Guinea

A paper presented at CoEDL Fest, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 4 February 2019

ABSTRACT

Papua New Guinea occupies only 1% of the world’s land mass and is home to just 0.1% of its population, yet it is host to 10% of the world’s spoken languages (Evans & Klamer, 2012). Despite this phenomenal spoken language diversity, up until now almost no attention has been paid to signed languages (SLs) of PNG (the only published study of a SL in PNG being Kendon, 1980a, 1980b, 1980c). Over the past three years we have worked on two of them, both of which show hallmarks of rapid language evolution. Firstly, we discuss Kailge Sign Language (KaiSL), a very small sign language centered on one deaf adult in a rural community. KaiSL has evolved very rapidly, a claim which we support through comparison with other young SLs, and through showcasing its tight conversational turns, its “non-present” time adverb, and a non-manual subject marker. We argue that KaiSL’s rapid emergence has been facilitated by an available repertoire of widely-known conventionalized gestures or “common signs” within the wider deaf-hearing communicative ecology in the Kailge region. This corroborates Nyst’s (2010)argument based on research in West Africa, that societies with rich multimodal communicative strategies support rapid evolution of local SLs. We close by briefly reviewing Reed’s new work on PNGSL, a newly emergent, highly variable deaf community SL which is growing out of a fusion of imported Australasian Signed English manual signs, calques of spoken Tok Pisin, and local sign languages like KaiSL.

References

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Kendon, A. (1980b). A description of a deaf-mute sign language from the Enga Province of Papua New Guinea with some comparative discussion. Part II: The semiotic functioning of Enga signs. Semiotica, 32, 81–117.

Kendon, A. (1980c). A description of a deaf-mute sign language from the Enga Province of Papua New Guinea with some comparative discussion. Part III: Aspects of utterance construction. Semiotica, 32, 245–313.

Nyst, V. (2010). Sign language in West Africa. In D. Brentari (Ed.),Sign languages: A Cambridge language survey(pp. 405–432). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.